Adult immigrant students in language courses benefit from paired discussions not only by acquiring second language proficiency, but also by developing soft skills that enhance their employability in the host society, such as the ability to maintain meaningful discussions with unknown people, interview, and networking skills. Applied regularly,…

This brief is part of a series that highlights key features of high-quality instruction for English learners and the role formative assessment plays in their success. Formative assessment supports teachers to enact these features by providing them with tools to gauge and react to student learning in real-time. These practices also support students…

This study describes the factors that enhanced students' construction of arguments when participating in culturally infused discussions at an undergraduate English as a foreign language British Culture course. The research was conducted at a university in Northwestern Colombia. This paper presents a section of the results of a larger project whose…

The goal of this study is to contribute to the field of Japanese pedagogy by examining how Japanese native speakers and learners of Japanese as a foreign language with American cultural backgrounds take stances in discussions in Japanese. As stancetaking is a fundamental human behavior (Du Bois & Karkkainen, 2012; Iwasaki, 2015; Kiesling,…

To successfully interact in a new language, learners must effectively take turns and manage the floor. Expectations and rules for turn-taking can differ between languages, making this more than a question of grammatical proficiency and vocabulary acquisition. In addition, the increased use of videoconferencing software in education and beyond…

Self-efficacy has emerged as a popular construct in second language research, especially in the frontline and practitioner-researcher spaces. A troubling trend in the relevant literature is that self-efficacy is often measured in a general or global manner. Such research ignores the fact that self-efficacy is a smaller context-driven construct…

This classroom practice article explores the integration of TalkAbroad, an online language conversation platform, in an undergraduate World Languages Education program to support pre-service language teachers' oral proficiency development. Two pre-service teachers, facing challenges like family responsibilities and limited study abroad…

In a context in which opportunities for oral interaction are limited (English as a foreign language courses at a Saudi tertiary institution), we carried out an action research project evaluating the introduction of computer-mediated spoken language tasks with a group of intermediate learners. Although the students were confronted with multiple…

The global expansion in the Internet access and the rise of digital media are compatible with students' characteristics as generations-Z who mainly engage in nature through mobile applications. Because of the characteristics of today's students and the growth of digital media and information, there is a need for critical media literacy (CML)…

The Internet has been conducive to English as a foreign language (EFL) students' agency. However, EFL learners' agency does not necessarily make them autonomous learners, although agency and autonomy are interchangeably used. By addressing the link and difference between these two constructs, this qualitative exploratory case study sets out to…

Numerous studies have investigated the effects of prewriting tasks on writing quality and language (e.g., individual vs. collaborative planning, text-chat vs. face-to-face [FTF] discussion, etc.). Recent meta-analyses have found a small advantage for text chat on writing, but no studies involved logographic languages, for which character learning…

Although the literature on collaborative writing has revealed the advantages of collaboration in improving the writing quality of learners, few studies have examined the development of the interaction qualities during collaboration. Thus, the present study tracked the development of scaffolding episodes (SEs) in the collaborative performance of…

Second language confidence (L2C) is considered a central component in language learning as it can affect the processes and outcomes of second language acquisition (Dornyei, 2005). According to the functional model proposed by Sampasivam and Clement (2014), the two determinants that build towards L2C are "self-involvement" and…

In this Teaching Tips article, we discuss our efforts to create and utilize translanguaging interactive read-aloud videos as part of a community-wide reading program focused on the reading and discussing of a shared book. Offering translanguaging spaces for bilingual readers in area elementary classrooms and the community, these videos were…

Intercultural dialogue is an essential component of intercultural citizenship, i.e., students' ability to address complex societal issues. With more interconnected problems comes an increased need for students to communicate and collaborate with people from differing backgrounds. This pilot study combined the framework of Intercultural Citizenship…